Oh Freedom Over Me

 

In the email from rightwing poll aggregator Real Clear Politics:

Sweet Christ, Carl, you're still fretting about how four and a half years ago Twitter followed FBI advice that the New York Post's Hunter laptop story might be infected by Russian disinformation and blocked links to the Post for [checks notes] nearly three whole days, leaving users to the humiliation of having to find it on Facebook instead? 

(If it had been four days, Trump totally would have won the election? Uh, maybe a comforting thought for Trump but I really don't think so.)

Meanwhile, the Republican White House is openly blackmailing the country's public school system, public and private universities, medical research institutions and hospitals, museums, national parks, armed services, federal and state judges and prosecutors, numerous prestigious law firms, and the privately owned press and public broadcast media to adopt its ideological positions on everything from history to biology and energy production, for which Twitter now, acquired by a multibillionaire who appears to have become literally the president's single-dad housemate, what a setup for Aaron Sorkin's new series "The East Wing", serves as a propagandist. 

Maybe you'd like to say that there's no constitutional prohibition against the Executive making laws abridging the freedom of the press so there's nothing we can do about it? It's not over till it's over! Don't surrender in advance!

And the FBI was right, too, BTW; the laptop (which wasn't in fact the laptop, which seems to have been squirreled away in impenetrable FBI secrecy for years, but Rudolph Giuliani's alleged copy of its hard drive), was certainly infected by Russian disinformation from the Russia agents he worked with, Pavel Fuks, Andrij Telizhenko, Andrij Derkach, and so on, though it never made it into a criminal case against Hunter Biden anyway, largely because as evidence it was total garbage with which special prosecutor Durham could never think of anything to do. And it was never a First Amendment case even under one of the weird interpretations that are going around (social media companies were always able to, and frequently did, ignore the FBI's advice).

But whoever has ever been living in terror that a bunch of college students might "cancel" them or even be publicly rude to them really needs to wake up to the evidence of what real deprivation of freedom of speech is like, where the president's impression of wrongthink is getting people fired from their jobs in really large numbers, prevented from doing peer-approved research, prevented from curating peer-approved museum exhibitions and staging peer-approved plays and dance events and the like, fired from research jobs and medical jobs and teaching jobs or if they're students thrown out of school, or if they're foreigners thrown out and transported by midnight plane without communicating with their families or lawyers to the 21st-century equivalent of Devil's Island. Something like the McCarthy era (under the guidance of Roy Cohn's old pupils Stone, Manafort, and Trump) is really back.

I mean, the Reagan administration and the Bush II administration had the cynicism and clownishness and the violent foreign policy from South and Central America to West Africa and the Middle East and the furious push to increase economic inequality through the tax system, a democratic society really shouldn't have tolerated any of it. I'n not fighting it because I'm such a good person, I'd fighting it because they're after me. I'm not even saying it's worse now, I'm saying it's personal. 

If I should have fought it harder in the past, now I have no choice. They're really after me and my friends and family. If I should have felt the attack on everybody, now I feel it on us. If I've made fun of the cult of the Founders and their commitment to FREEDOM, because of the way they willingly denied freedom to enslaved people and women and workers and foreigners and "deviants" of one kind and another from the beginning, it's my freedom now: I've always been able to complain about the abuse I saw around me, and do a little something for others, giving a few dollars to ACLU and a candidate here and there, grousing about the reactionary views of some of my kids' teachers, writing a blog. I'm not sure even these little things can last. All freedom is threatened now, except for the freedom you can buy with huge amounts of money, like Justin Sun openly—openly!—escaping fraud charges with $400 million in bribes, or that other asshole with the fake e-vehicle, Trevor Milton. That kind of freedom works better than ever.

They want us in jail. They want suicides. And they give zero fucks about "free speech" because, you know why? Because they've got expensive speech, all you could ever desire, from the philosophical Charles Koch to the drugged-up Elon Musk. You know what I'm saying? Your freedom is absolutely in jeopardy.

But Tell Us About That Terrible Leftist Cancel Culture

 

Protesters in Austin, 2013, against back-door creationism in public schools. Photo by Patrick Michels/Texas Observer.

This was some headline, in the Texas Tribune, which is a treasure of an online newspaper:

Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture

Like an "accusation" of such a crime is enough to get you in trouble with the administration.

The professor, Joy Alonzo, an expert in opioids, wasn't even at her own institution; she was giving a guest lecture at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, to a class of first-year medical students including the daughter of Dawn Buckingham, Texas Land Commissioner, a former state senator from the time when Dan Patrick was a state senator too, and a friend of Texas A&M chancellor John Sharp. Shortly after the lecture ended around noon and she was driving home, Buckingham was on the phone with Patrick, and also to the system's vice chancellor for government relations; Sharp opened an investigation, sending Patrick a text a couple of hours later:

“Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”

At 4:22, the course coordinator in Galveston had sent an email to the class with a "STATEMENT OF FORMAL CENSURE":

Nick gives himself a sad

H/t PJ for the idea.

Buster Keaton and Roscoe Arbuckle in Oh, Doctor! (1917), via SilentWeeks.

Shorter Nicholas Kristof, "A Confession of Liberal Intolerance", New York Times, May 7 2016:

Golly, folks, we progressives are supposed to be so open and accepting, so how come conservative intellectuals in our academic institutions are forced to use separate drinking fountains and bathrooms and summer camps? I've been thinking about this because I wrote about it on Facebook. 

That last bit is practically verbatim:

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

He tried saying something about it without thinking, and that didn't work out, so now he's looking at this alternative approach. What strikes me here is something I've never noticed about Kristof, which is that he's really not very good at thinking; his idea of thinking is to assert that something is bad, enumerate many examples of its badness, and declare that something needs to be done about it, for which he may or may not have some specific suggestions which may or may not be of some use; there's no dialectic between, for instance, different ways of approaching the problem.